In a deeply moving and intellectually rigorous talk, Dr Azille Coetzee brought to life the core questions of her recent work, Desire at the End of the White Line: Notes on the Decolonisation of White Afrikaner Femininity. Delivered with striking openness and academic finesse, her address unfolded as both an embodied memoir and a theoretical exploration, inviting listeners to interrogate the ongoing entanglement of race, gender, and desire in South Africa’s social fabric.

Opening with a reflection on the fraught place of feminism in white Afrikaans culture, Coetzee admitted how, at a family braai, the mere mention of the word ‘feminism’ could trigger visible discomfort. A shoulder pulled back, or a head cocked, she recounted, noting how the conversation would shift uneasily as people asked her to explain what feminism really meant. Her initial safe answer that feminism is simply the belief in the equivalence of men and women, would pacify her listeners. Yet, as her scholarship deepened, so too did her response: in South Africa, one cannot discuss gender without grappling with race. In answer to the question, ”What’s race got to do with rape?’, South African feminist scholar Pumla Gqola answers unequivocally, everything.”

Coetzee’s talk traced how white Afrikaner identity, far from being a static inheritance, was violently and deliberately manufactured. Historically, Afrikaners were “just about white” in British eyes and pursued whiteness through “an immense amount of resources, organising, the disciplining and surveillance of the self, and great brutality against others.” Whiteness, she argued, was, and remains, a relentless project, deeply embedded in the sexual and familial ordering of society.

Drawing the audience into the granular intimacy of her inquiry, Coetzee explored how sexual morality served as a cornerstone of racial identity under apartheid. The white Afrikaans woman was tasked with a heavy symbolic burden: birthing and raising white children to secure both the future of the volk and the continued claim to land. Without compliant white women, “there is no nation,” she asserted, describing how apartheid’s racial logic was built around family, sex, and the maintenance of hierarchical order.

Yet it was her vivid engagement with personal vulnerability that brought the academic into sharp, human focus. Coetzee confessed, “I feel it in myself, this willingness to cede power to the white man,” mapping how obedience to these old scripts of whiteness pulses, even today, through the lives of middle-class white Afrikaner women. In our suburbs, she noted, “apartheid divisions are privatized in lieu of state enforcement,” with security gates and private schools replacing formal legislation.

In a particularly emotional moment, Coetzee discussed her choice to weave memoir into scholarship. It was not without trepidation. She acknowledged that this move was ‘risky’, as the academic establishment often demands a dispassionate voice. However, by embedding her own life into the text, she sought to destabilize the safe distance usually maintained in scholarship: “How should I actually be living? How should I be spending my time, and with who?” she asked.

Perhaps most hauntingly, Coetzee turned to the story of three white women shipwrecked on the Pondoland coast, who refused repatriation to Europe because they had forged new lives with indigenous communities. The women, initially pleased at the prospect of rescue, eventually declined to leave, citing their ties to the land, their families, and their communities, communities that had grown to include hundreds of people of mixed ancestry. Their decision defied the racial anxieties of the colonial order. Rather than clinging to a fantasy of pure, exilic whiteness, they embraced a life entangled with African belonging. “This is how to become black,” she quoted from Hugo ka Canham, reclaiming the possibility of living otherwise. She proposed that this refusal to return, this act of “clasping the possibility of being different”, offers a counter-history, a vision of whiteness not fortified by separateness but undone by relationality. It is an instance where whiteness, rather than being protected and purified, was relinquished in favour of belonging among the dispossessed. These women, by choosing the relational, the indigenous, and the ‘unsettled’, remind us that alternative modes of being are not merely hypothetical; they have been lived.

The conversation between Dr Coetzee and Dr Anell Daries (moderator) further deepened the session’s impact. Daries honed in on Coetzee’s discussion of how white women have historically been central to maintaining whiteness, not only symbolically but materially, through their reproductive labour and affective ties. Daries astutely connected Coetzee’s arguments to broader histories of racial fear and the ‘appropriate ways’ of being white. The two reflected on how deviating from this narrow script of whiteness, whether through interracial relationships, queerness, or political defiance—produced a specific kind of cultural fear. Their exchange traced how desire and fear have been harnessed, not only to structure the intimacy of white lives but also to police the racialised order of South African society. Their dialogue offered a vivid illustration of the emotional architecture that continues to underpin race and class divisions today.

During the Q&A session, the discussion turned to how deeply fear was woven into white Afrikaner identity. Fear, Coetzee argued, is not incidental but structural: “fear is really the kind of affect at the heart of this identity.” It was fear that policed the movements and desires of white women under apartheid, keeping them tethered to white men, land, and racial purity narratives. Even now, these fears are activated in subtler forms, sustaining the micro-apartheids of contemporary life. Throughout, Coetzee’s work wrestled with the unasked questions of desire: whom do white Afrikaner women turn towards, whom do they shrink from, and how are these intimate orientations tethered to broader structures of power? She challenged her audience to reflect critically on their daily lives, to ask slowly and repeatedly, “what is it that I desire? What do I fear, and why?”

In the end, Coetzee’s presentation was more than a talk; it was an invitation, urgent yet patient, to imagine ways of being that rupture the inherited scripts of whiteness. It called for the difficult work of desiring differently, of living toward a future that is less about ownership and control, and more about connection and shared becoming.

As one attendee movingly noted, Coetzee’s research was not just intellectually impressive; it was ‘embodied research,’ where the psychosomatic meets the political. In speaking through whiteness rather than simply about it, Coetzee opened rare space for collective reckoning, and perhaps, for repair.